The average household sends 500lbs of kitchen waste to the landfill or down the drain each year. Be part of the solution! Let me do the work.
For only $5.00 per week I supply the pail and pick it up each week.

Call DOWN-TO-EARTH KITCHEN COMPOST PICKUP today to sign up!….

I think this is great idea and I wrote an email to tell them so. I also invited them to explore possible solutions for both customers and them that Biosa and Bokashi could provide.

Even if I hear nothing back, I am happy to see that it is happening in the region where I live.
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MOBY has invited Al … to do a Bokashi Composting workshop. I have been using the system for a year now and love it ( no fruit-flies in the summer). Please RSVP moby_lize@yahoo.ca if you would like to attend.

To be clear, we will not be making bokashi. I am showing the process, how it works and the results bokashi compost dug into Tina D’s MOBY garden plot in January. In all, we’re looking at about 30 – 45 minutes.

One of my clients – Bentley Christie – is interviewed about composting by this online non-profit that “provides open graphic design and other services/projects.” Near the end, when Bentley talks about bokashi, they feature two of my photos. Here is one of them:

Credit for all Flickr Creative Commons photos is given at the end of the podcast.

Heather showed me a new composting initiative taking place at the Vancouver Aquarium. Eighty percent of waste produced at the cafeteria including plates, cups, cutlery, napkins and food waste, goes to a compost facility in Metro Vancouver.

We have decided to start an office composting system. We only have 13 employees so we aren’t generating a large amount of waste, but we still think we should try and cut down. Our first idea was to have a company come in and pick up our compostable materials, but after some searching we found that Vancouver doesn’t currently have this system in place. Smithrite offers this, but not for offices as small as ours. We then thought about setting up a worm bin, but from our research we think that this method can be smelly and there are a lot of materials that have to be kept out.

Then we found the “Bokashi Bucket”. It was appealing to us because it claims to have no smell, no worms, recycles all types of waste other than liquids and is small enough for in the office kitchen.

The post includes a link to my website and updates have already been posted

Recycling is a hot issue and the numbers speak for themselves: Hong Kong’s population of almost seven million produces 15,000 tones of waste a day and landfill space is rapidly running out, with officials predicting existing sites to be saturated within three years. Source

If you want to grow food successfully in containers, nurturing soil life can make a huge difference. Worm compost, for example, is full of microbes and life. Add it to your containers and you will get more vigorous growth, and far fewer pest and disease problems. Discovering this, was the biggest turning point in my growing (more important, even, than self watering containers), transforming sporadic successes into something more consistent.

Why is soil life important?

Healthy organic soil in the natural world supports a web of life including bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes as well as larger creatures like worms and slugs. These organisms play a vital role in the life of plants. They break down organic matter to make the nutrients available for plant roots. They condition the soil and create air spaces and tunnels in it – improving aeration and drainage. And they compete with other more harmful organisms in the soil, ones that will damage your plants if left unchecked.

Soil life is complex – so the above is just my attempt to summarise some of the main benefits you can expect when you add life to your containers!

Why do you need to add life to containers?

Most commercial composts that we buy are sterilised and low in microbial life. So is municipal compost (it has to be made at hot temperatures to kill pathogens, killing much of the beneficial life, too). So if you want life in your containers – and to mimic soil in the natural world – you need to add it.

1. Worm compost

2. Homemade compost

3. Leaf mould

4. Manure

5. Bokashi

Bokashi is Japanese method of composting food quickly in a tightly sealed bucket. Benefits of bokashi are that you can add almost any food (even meat), it works quickly, can be done in a very small space, and doesn’t smell (much). The drawbacks are that you need to buy bokashi bran for it to work, and the pickled product is not as versatile as worm compost. But you can add it to the bottom of containers to add both organic matter and microorganisms.

Mix about 10 – 20% into the compost in the bottom third of a container.